A recording and a-muse-ment of my virtual trials and travails in the metaverse.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

This One's For You, LL

Just a tiny post to make you aware of a rant making the rounds:

"Longtime Googler Steve Yegge posted an insightful rant on his Google+ page about how Google is failing to make platforms of its products. He also shares some interesting little tidbits about his six year stint at Amazon working for the 'Dread Pirate Bezos'. The rant was intended to be shared only with his Google coworkers, but was accidentally made public. Steve has since removed it from his page, but it has been reposted elsewhere."

I'm posting this rant and link because there's one single, simple sentence in the midst of it that applies to Linden Labs; that encapsulates my feelings, and that of the other Second Life critiquers:

" The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them."

LINDEN LABS, THAT LINE IS FOR YOU.

Pehaps there are Lindens who check my blog to see what the "sl haytr" is on about this week. I can only hope they read this and understand this is something heartfelt from a long-time Google employee that applies to LL, or to any of the hundreds of companies I have watched bite the digital dust in the last 25 years.

If I didn't care about SL, I'd let them sink into the tar pits and go on to other grids rather than remaining there, paying tier month after month and promoting the educational and artistic uses of Second Life and virtual worlds, as I have been doing for half my life.

I always have to translate this stuff into Early Popular Culture in hopes I got it. So, two attempts....: "If you build it [a good platform] they will come -- and do spectacular things with it." Or maybe, "It's the infrastructure, stupid!"